Age and the Reach of Sociological Imagination

Power, Ideology and the Life Course

Dale Dannefer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

The dominant narratives of both science and popular culture typically define aging and human development as self-contained individual matters, failing to recognize the degree to which they are shaped by experiential and contextual contingencies. Our understandings of age are thereby "boxed in" and constricted by assumptions of "normality" and naturalness that limit our capacities to explore possible alternative experiences of development and aging, and the conditions – both individual and social – that might foster such experiences.

Combining foundational principles of critical social science with recent breakthroughs in research across disciplines ranging from biology to economics, this book offers a scientifically and humanly expanded landscape for apprehending the life course. Rejecting familiar but false dichotomies such as "nature vs. nurture" and "structure vs. agency", it clarifies the organismic fundamentals that make the actual content of experience so centrally important in age and development, and it also explores why attention to these fundamentals has been so resisted in studies of individuals and individual change, and in policy and practice as well.

In presenting the basic principles and reviewing the current state of knowledge, Dale Dannefer introduces multi-levelled social processes that shape human development and aging over the life course and age as a cultural phenomenon – organizing his approach around three key frontiers of inquiry that each invite a vigorous exercise of sociological imagination: the Social-Structural Frontier, the Biosocial Frontier and the Critical-Reflexive Frontier.

CHAPTER 1
SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION AND HUMAN AGING

As a senior citizen was driving down the freeway, his cell phone rang. Answering, he heard his wife’s urgent voice warning him, “Herman, I just heard on the news that there’s a car going the wrong way on Interstate 77. Please be careful!”

“Hell!” said Herman, “It’s not just one car. It’s hundreds of ’em!”

Three old guys were out walking.

First one said, “Windy, isn’t it?”

The second one said, “No, it’s Thursday!”

The third one said, “So am I. Let’s go get a beer!”

During John McCain’s presidential campaign, he visited a senior community in Florida. He was surprised that two women residents he encountered at a community center did not seem to recognize him. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

One of the women answered, “No, but if you check with that nurse at the desk, she can tell you”.

You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, “See if you can blow this out.”

Jerry Seinfeld

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” But if they had? “If that is the exchange, I’m all in.”

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick speaking about COVID risk, on Fox TV News, 3/23/2020

AGE CONSCIOUSNESS AND AGEISM IN CULTURE AND SCIENCE

Although we live in an era in which political correctness and basic civility and respectfulness inhibit jokes and stereotypical commentary across multiple domains including race, religion, ethnicity and gender, the subject of age remains fair game. The manifestations of ageism in popular culture are wide-ranging, from the open season on old age of late night comedians to well-documented practices of discrimination in the workplace or other settings, which often continue unchecked even when they are subject to legal sanction.

A decided lack of attention to ageism as a research problem in the social and behavioral sciences has been well documented by several scholars (Nelson 2005; North and Fiske 2012; Palmore 1999). In the US, where age discrimination is illegal, older scientists who submit grant proposals through peer-review processes that claim to be purely objective and meritocratic encounter an unapologetic and often overt ageism (Kahana, Slone, Kahana, Langendoerfer, and Reynolds 2016). At least one leading expert has recently presented a strong case that ageism in general, as a standard component of contemporary popular culture, is actually on the increase (Gullette 2011).

Neither the cultural impulses that generate ageism nor the ease with which it is popularly accepted can be reduced to any single cause. Yet one force that clearly provides a legitimating framework for such ideas is a largely unquestioned inclination to subscribe to the idea that development and aging are self-contained matters of the individual—anchored in time-bound, chronometrically governed processes working themselves out within the organism, within each human body.

Reinforcing such notions is the counterpart belief—so deeply rooted that it typically goes unquestioned and unremarked—that aging is a largely inevitable process that pervades the body, driven by imperatives of physical change with the passage of time. Indeed, that is how it typically appears in everyday life, as we observe family members or other longtime acquaintances going through gradual but seemingly predictable long-term patterns of physical and social change. And if so, perhaps there is nothing to do but accept it—and joke about it.

SOCIOLOGY, LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT AND THE LIFE-COURSE FALLACY: A FIRST WAVE OF CONCEPTUAL TRANSFORMATION

For gerontologists and other scientists studying age-related phenomena, the idea that aging inevitably entails a one-way process of pervasive and multidimensional decline and adverse change was largely rejected several decades ago in an intellectual revolution that transformed the scientific study of aging in the 1960s and 1970s. A key factor in this revolution was the discovery that people who are born at different times grow up and grow older in dramatically different ways with regard to functioning, health and cognitive performance, and also with regard to lifestyle, attitudes, activities, social relationships and even longevity. How people age and how people change with age was found to be, in considerable measure, historically contingent.

Until this realization, it was common practice to assume that patterns of aging could be inferred “cross-sectionally”—that is, by comparing individuals of different ages at a single point in time—just by looking at the differences between, for example, 25-year-olds and 65-year-olds. A classic example of the extent to which this broad-based discovery called into question the then-current “established wisdom” concerning age and aging is provided by Warner Schaie and Sherry Willis’s (1986) comparison of cross-sectional and longitudinal data on cognitive performance (see Figure 1.1). In contrast to the dramatic declines suggested by a cross-sectional analysis, longitudinal data follow the same individuals over time, and present a dramatically different picture: A relatively high degree of stability, with a long-term gradual trend of increase, followed after age 60 followed by an equally gradual decline. In this work, Schaie and Willis (1986) highlighted the risk of reaching erroneous conclusions about aging (as has indeed often has been done) based on evidence from cross-sectional data (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Cognitive performance by age, comparing cross-sectional and longitudinal data

Source: Adapted from Schaie and Willis 1986:298

If the contrast between the two lines in Figure 1.1 initially appears puzzling, a key to understanding it can be found by considering trends in education over the same time period. The plummeting cross-sectional line in Figure 1.1 representing an age-related cross-sectional decline in cognitive performance is mirrored by the historical trend of educational attainment in the US over the same time period, as can be seen in Figure 1.2. However, since educational attainment is not a reversible characteristic, it quickly becomes apparent that the age-related decline in education requires a conceptual recalibration. It is factually correct, yet it is obvious that it cannot be interpreted as an effect of age, since graduating from high school cannot be undone. Thus, this figure reveals nothing whatever about the process of aging; it reflects instead the dramatic expansion of mass education in the US (and elsewhere) across the decades of the 20th century, It is an artifact of the long-term 20th-century historical trend of educational expansion, just as is the cross-sectional pattern of cognitive performance.

Figure 1.2 Proportion graduating from high school in the US, 1920–2000

Source: Derived from Table 223, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1992, p. 145

Figure 1.1 thus illustrates the dangers of the life-course fallacy (Riley, Johnson, and Foner 1972; Riley 1973), which is the practice of assuming that cross-sectional comparisons can be relied upon to represent biographical, life-course patterns. It demonstrates dramatically the difference between how individuals of different ages appear at a particular point in time compared with the actual experience of individuals as they move through the life course.

With a proliferation of such discoveries across a range of characteristics and throughout the life course in the 1960s and 1970s, longstanding assumptions about aging were suddenly subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. Along with a recognition of the dangers of the life-course fallacy came a compelling new set of insights, a fresh sense of intellectual and existential possibilities with respect to aging and several new principles to guide research: First, that understanding how people change with age requires tracing individuals and cohorts over time, and cannot be inferred from “cross-sectional” comparisons of old and young people at a single point in time, immediately rendering suspect the longstanding research practice of making pronouncements about the effects of age based on such cross-sectional comparisons. Second, that an accurate understanding of how people change as they age could not be inferred from age alone but required data on what specifically happens to them as they age. This principle, in turn, compelled a recognition of the essential need for longitudinal data as a basis for an adequate characterization of patterns of aging. Finally, it compelled the recognition of the methodological centrality of cohort analysis (Alwin 1991; Riley et al. 1972; Riley 1973; Ryder 1965; Uhlenberg 1988). The discovery of the importance of cohort analysis was not limited to a single discipline. While its basic logic and the associated techniques are derived from demography (Ryder 1965), its importance was recognized in psychology (Baltes 1968; Schaie 1965), sociology (Riley and Foner 1968), epidemiology (Breslow 1985) and other social science fields (e.g., Cline 1980).

As the life-course fallacy became recognized in the scientific specializations that study aging and human development, its insights and implications had a cataclysmic impact, prompting a paradigm change that spread rapidly across disciplines. It fueled the development of the contemporary field of the sociology of age (see, e.g., Matilda White Riley’s landmark paper, “Aging and Cohort Succession” [1973]), and the establishment of the life-course perspective (Cain 1964; Clausen 1972; Elder 1975), which was launched to prominence by the publication of Glen Elder’s classic monograph, Children of the Great Depression ([1974]1999)—the study which provided a foundational introduction to the importance of life-course circumstances and experiences in shaping subsequent patterns of aging.

In psychology, parallel developments were also occurring, with the emergence of lifespan psychology in the late 1960s similarly deriving from a recognition of the dangers of inferring biographical, life-course patterns from cross-sectional data (Schaie 1965; Baltes and Schaie 1976). On this basis, reviewing at the end of the 1970s what he then accurately called the “explosion” of life-span work, Paul Baltes wrote that life-span research had demonstrated that traditional views of human development were “unduly restrictive”.

He argued that an adequate conceptual framework for approaching human development and aging must include “multidimensionality, multidirectionality, and discontinuity” (1979:263) as integral features of human aging. While such arguments were not readily embraced in psychology (Baltes and Schaie 1974, 1976; Horn and Donaldson 1976, 1977; Horn, Donaldson, and Engstrom 1981), their evidentiary grounding combined with an expanding interest in adulthood and aging earned them growing respect and interest. Thus, the traditional views and established organismic approaches to age and human development were being rapidly supplanted across multiple disciplines.

These major theoretical breakthroughs were soon accompanied by advances in the domains of data, methods and techniques of analysis based on the establishment of large-scale longitudinal data sets. In 1988, the National Institute on Aging convened a panel that led to the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a large-scale longitudinal study of 50+-year-olds that began in 1992, which was designed to facilitate the study of longitudinal life-course change and cohort differences. The HRS study design has been replicated in other nations, which include the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), the Study of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) with further longitudinal studies continuing to be launched elsewhere, including in developing countries such as India and Mexico. In the US, other studies with similar designs and purposes quickly followed, some focusing on younger participants, including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Newly developing riches in multi-cohort panel data also led to the refinement of relevant analytic techniques (e.g., event history analysis) and the development of new ones (e.g., latent growth curve modeling, sequence analysis) (Collins and Sayer 2001; Singer and Willett 2003; Yang and Land 2016).

In sociology, the initial theoretical developments paralleled and stimulated scholarly development of work on aging from other theoretical traditions—interactionist, constructivist and critical—that also challenged the traditional approach to human development and aging. Working from an interactionist approach, Vern Bengtson (1973) demonstrated the potentials for applying labeling theory to aging, and Jay Gubrium (1976) demonstrated how aging in nursing homes and medical settings could be usefully viewed as a constructed social reality as well as a biomedical one.

Early examples of a critical approach were introduced soon thereafter. Carroll Estes (1979) posed a challenge to the normative and “natural aging” assumptions of the biomedical model and its ideological underpinnings with her monograph The Aging Enterprise, and Victor Marshall and Joseph Tindale (1979) introduced the potentials of a “radical” approach in correcting the normative biases inherent in the field. Estes’ analysis was soon followed by further articulations of the political economy critique (Phillipson 1982; Walker 1981). At the same time, historians and demographers began to focus on age and old age with a new scrutiny, examining how the meaning of age—from the childhood and teenage years to old age—has changed historically, in response to demographic shifts, technological developments and broader changes in social structure (Achenbaum 1978, 2015; Demos 1978; Haber 1983; Hareven 2013 [1978]; Laslett 1965; Uhlenberg 1974, 1978).

Taken together, these contemporaneous efforts had a powerful effect. They posed a serious challenge to adhere...